2002
Report #53
4 p.m. CST, Friday, Dec. 13, 2002
Mission Control Center, Houston, Texas
Nearing the end of their third week on orbit, the crewmembers of the sixth
expedition to the International Space Station have dug in to the agenda of scientific
research laid out for their four-month tour of duty.
Early this week Commander Ken Bowersox, Flight Engineer Nikolai Budarin, and
NASA ISS Science Officer Don Pettit completed the first of three rounds of sample
collection for a Human Life Sciences experiment looking into the risk of kidney
stone formation in astronauts during extended spaceflights. The investigation,
developed by Peggy Whitson before her assignment on the Expedition 5 crew, tests
whether the use of potassium citrate, which has been used successfully to combat
kidney stones in people on Earth, decreases the occurrence of stone formation in
astronauts during long periods in a microgravity environment. This week
Bowersox, Budarin and Pettit also finished their first monthly session with an
apparatus that measures pulmonary function, gathering data on possible adverse
impacts from being in zero-g or in the lower-than-normal atmospheric pressure
inside a spacesuit during a spacewalk.
On Thursday Pettit completed a scheduled monthly check of the GASMAP equipment
in the Human Research Facility rack. The Gas Analyzer System for Metabolic
Physiology analyzes gases in a crewmember's breath so flight surgeons can assess
aerobic capacity; it also measures cardiac output and lung volume and efficiency.
Flight control teams in Houston and Moscow continue to work on rescheduling the
increment's only planned spacewalk, which was postponed this week. The spacewalk
by Bowersox and Budarin, which includes tasks to continue outfitting the station's
new P1 Truss but is not time-critical, is being considered for late January.
The station's Expedition 5 crewmembers—Commander Valery Korzun, NASA
ISS Science Officer Peggy Whitson, and Flight Engineer Sergei
Treschev—completed their 185-day spaceflight Dec. 7 when the space
shuttle Endeavour and its crew, after waiting out three days of poor weather, landed
at Kennedy Space Center. Endeavour delivered Expedition 6 and the P1 Truss during
its two-week mission. Korzun, Whitson and Treschev returned to the Johnson
Space Center in Houston Monday to continue their physical rehabilitation after six
months in weightlessness.
Information on the crew's activities aboard the space station, future launch dates,
as well as station sighting opportunities from anywhere on the Earth, is available
on the Internet at:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/
Details on station science operations can be found on an Internet site administered
by the Payload Operations Center at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville, Ala., at:
http://www.scipoc.msfc.nasa.gov/
The next ISS status report will be issued on Friday, Dec. 20, or sooner if events
warrant.